When bad boys become good and kind, they have the
power of making their homes gay and new with happiness.
-Carlo Collodi, The
Adventures of Pinocchio

Pardon the hyperbole, but I wonder if we can't trace a goodly portion
of the decline of Western culture in just the drop-off from Walt Disney's
Pinocchio
to Steven Spielberg's
A. I.:
Artificial Intelligence. Despite the surface similarities between
these tales of a wooden boy on the one hand and a robot boy on the other,
both of whom hope to become real, and despite Mr. Spielberg's quite conscious
attempt to implicate Pinocchio in his film, it is really the differences
between the two that are instructive. Pinocchio is a story of the
moral education of boy, an education which when completed makes him human.
A.I. is the story of the emotional retardation of a boy, a retardation
which sees him live for thousands of years without ever progressing beyond
a desperate need for his mommy's love. It may well be that both stories
are about becoming human, but what they tell us about how our culture perceived
humanity at these different times is rather depressing. In 1940,
to be human was to be a moral being. In 2001, to be human is to fixate
on your own emotional needs. That's progress?

In Pinocchio, the kindly woodcarver Gepetto has made one particularly
beguiling puppet of a little boy. Because of all the joy he has brought
to others, when he wishes upon a star the Blue Fairy grants the puppet
life. Pinocchio mistakenly believes himself to have become a real
boy, but the Blue Fairy explains: "Pinocchio, if you are brave, truthful,
and unselfish, you will be a real boy someday." She evens gives him
a conscience, in the form of Jiminy Cricket, to help him tell right from
wrong.

The task before Pinocchio then is plain enough, if not simple.
And so begins the familiar series of adventures that sees him skipping
school, joining a theater troop, being kidnapped to Pleasure Island, and
ending up finally in the belly of the whale, Monstro. Along the way
he learns vital lessons about what is expected of him, most memorably in
the scene where his lies to the Blue Fairy make his nose grow, because
a lie too grows until it's as plain as the nose on your face. In
a harsh but fair judgment, the Blue Fairy warns: "I'll forgive you
this once, Pinocchio. But this is the last time I can help you. Remember,
a boy who won't be good might just as well be made of wood!" Only
after he takes these lessons to heart, proves his bravery by rescuing Gepetto
from the whale, and sacrifices his own life getting his "father" to shore,
is Pinocchio restored to life and made real. His has been a journey
of moral awakening and development, but it has made him worthy of being
human and of his Father.

Meanwhile, A.I.,, which Stanley
Kubrick originally planned to base on Brian Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys
Last All Summer Long", tells the story of David (Haley
Joel Osment), a robot, or mecha, whose creator, Professor Allen Hobby
(William Hurt), has
made him to be "a robot who can love". The Professor says that "love
will be the key by which they acquire a kind of sub-conscious".
So, right off the bat, we've switched from the timeless battleground of
Man's struggle with Good and Evil to the oh-so modern realm of Freudian
complexes and conflicts.

Nor does David even have much of a role to play in his own story.
Created as a child substitute in a future where overpopulation and global-warming
catastrophes have led to strict limits on procreation, he's been programmed
to love the person who "imprints" him, his "mother" in this case.
But, as one of the Professor's employee asks: "Isn't the real conundrum:
can you get a human to love them back? If a robot could genuinely
love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha
in return?" And so, while David loves Monica Swinton (Frances
O'Connor) unreservedly, unthinkingly, and unflaggingly, she finds that
she can not love him as she would a real boy. His robotic mannerisms
are too off-putting for her ever to forget his machine nature. When
her own son is revived from a coma and her need for even an imperfect replacement
is removed, Monica leaves David in the woods, suggesting that the answer
to the question above is a person has no responsibility to a mecha, even
one that loves them.

Monica's decision, though extremely creepy, is defensible if we consider
that David is not a moral creature, and has no free will. Mere love
is not adequate to impose an obligation on Monica, particularly when David's
love is little different than that which a pet might have for his owner.
Compare Monica to Gepetto, who when Pinocchio goes missing sets out in
search of him. Pinocchio, though not yet human, is already human-like
in that he's engaged in the struggle to be good. This does impose
an obligation on Gepetto, the obligation of one human to another.

In the second act of A.I., David is taken under the wing of Gigolo Joe,
male hooker mecha who is taken with him to a Flesh Fair, a kind of Roman
Coliseum entertainment where humans vent their hatred of mechas as the
robots are destroyed. After they escape, Joe guides him through Rouge
City, a futuristic combination of Times Square and a Tokyo red-light district.
There a holographic soothsayer tells David where to find the Blue Fairy--who
he's become fixated on ever since his "brother" had Monica read them Pinocchio--at
the end of the world where the lions weep.

This cryptic locale proves to be a now submerged New York City, where
Professor Hobby has his workshop, and the Blue Fairy a statue underwater
at what was once a Pinocchio exhibit at Coney Island. But David is
determined that the Blue Fairy can make him a real boy and thereby win
him Monica's love, so he sits before the statue for some two thousand years,
praying to be made real, even as the seas freeze solid.

In the final act, he's found by an advanced group of beings conducting
an archaeological dig at the site. They are apparently the umpteenth
generation of robots and have survived mankind. David is precious
to them because he's the only remaining intelligence on Earth to have known
humans, to have known these machines' "creator". They have been trying
to clone humans from the bits of cellular material they come upon, but
these clones never last for more than a day.

In a scene of surpassing selfishness, David has them bring Monica back
for day. And for this day he is, of course, the very center of her
existence. At last he gets to be loved, even if just for a day, and
even if his wish requires her to die again.

How else can we describe this choice but as monstrous? And what
can this day mean to us, when an artificial boy who's programmed for nothing
but to "love" his mommy finally gets to experience the "love" of this fake
mommy? David is thousands of years old but he has not matured
at all. Mommy is thousands of years dead and did not love him when
she was real. What purpose has been served by this "boy's" "life"?
What is it, if we look at him objectively, that would make him deserving
of love or worthy of being a real human?

In defending his vision of David's purpose, Professor Hobby says that,
after all, God made us to love him. So why not make robots to love
us. Even if that were true, and I don't think it is, God also made
us with Free Will. God left it to us to make choices, even bad ones,
perhaps even the choice not to love him. Pinocchio captures our hearts
and minds because he too undergoes the quintessential human right of passage
as he learns which choices are good and which bad and struggles to make
the good ones, even when the bad seem more inviting. David's journey
is never our journey because he has no free will, he is but an automaton.
And the idea that his creator--be it Professor Hobby or be it Mr. Spielberg--would
give him as the sole aim of his existence the goal of being loved by mommy
is too Oedipal and too shallowly emotional for it to be other than weird.
It's entirely possible that this is what has become of Western man, that
we started out trying to develop souls and have ended up indulging our
feelings. If so, we too might just as well be made of wood, for we've
lost what made us truly human, that spark of the divine that once animated
us.